I’ve been making, what is, for me, quite a lot of bread in the month since Harry died. Probably, in an ideal world, where both Phil and I weren’t either almost constantly watching our weight, or actively trying to lose it, I would bake something every day, and more often than not, that thing would be bread. There’s just something about making a loaf of bread I find immensely comforting and reassuring.

In this very sad and busy time for us, I’ve been turning to quick breads frequently. I love proper yeasted breads, but quick breads have many obvious virtues, not the least of which is found in the name itself; they’re quick. No rising, no kneading, and in my experience, they’re forgiving little things, which take to freestyle adaptation happily enough. As long as you basically get the ratio of dry ingredients to wet right, and don’t stuff up the leavening, you’re golden. If you’re using self-raising flour, you’re set for the alkaline part of the leavening reaction without needing to find the measuring spoons. Yogurt, buttermilk, sour milk, beer, etc., will all take care of the acid. Then it’s just flavour as desired.

Mostly, I’ve just been making soda bread. I’ve always got yogurt, buttermilk, or, alas, milk that’s gone sour hanging about in the fridge, and if I’m not just going with my handy, ever-present little sack of self-raising flour, there’s always baking soda and/or baking powder in the pantry. Salt and honey in the house are givens. I’m never more than a couple of minutes of gathering the ingredients and mixing up the dough away from having a loaf of soda bread in the oven. I’ve been adding in rolled oats and playing with the flour mix from time to time, because both Phil and I prefer hearty, chewy, wholegrain bread, but you can always sweeten it up by mixing in some dried fruit — currants are particularly nice for this. You get something that tastes a bit like a rather austere scone.

This morning I realised that having a small loaf around for the rest of the weekend,would be useful, which brings me to another of quick bread’s chief virtues: you can make a pretty small loaf. If you’re using little packets of dried yeast, one is usually the right amount for a full-sized loaf, but if you have neither the time, nor the need, for a full-on 2lb sized loaf, this is where a savoury or plain quick bread will serve you well. I didn’t want to make soda bread yet again; I wanted something a bit savoury, and as I happened to have a single, lonely, bottle of Peroni taking up space in the pantry fridge, and most of a small bag of self-raising flour around, it seemed like a good time to make an old favourite: beer bread. I also had a nice-sized wedge of mature Lancashire cheese that wasn’t going to be used if we didn’t actually have bread to use it with, so I grated about a very loosely-packed cup of that into my dry ingredients, ground a bunch of black pepper in after that, then whisked about a teaspoon of honey and a tablespoon of melted butter into the beer, mixed it all together (do not overwork the quick breads, for they are like muffins, and benefit from lumpy batter!) and dumped it into a greased 1lb loaf pan. Pop it into a 180º C oven, and one gorgeously fragrant hour later, there’s my loaf of bread to see out the weekend.

The first that comes to mind is that you can’t go into a major supermarket without finding buckets of cheap daffodils, bringing a promise that spring will eventually arrive, for sale. I know these are, like, floral battery hens, but I cannot resist them. (Battery hen eggs, those I can resist. Gladly.) January is a hard month, without much to look forward to in the shops and markets, but those daffodils always buck me up a lot.

Still life, with Seville oranges and daffodils

Not, however, quite as much as their companions in that photo: Seville oranges! I love them so much. I’ve made marmalade before, but mostly, I buy as many of them as I can find and carry home, to zest and juice and stash in the freezer. It can be painful work, when your hands are as beat up as mine often are, but as long as I remember to put on a pair of latex gloves first, it’s not too bad, assuming I don’t bark my knuckles on the grater. I mix the zest with a bit of water, and freeze it, and the juice, in ice cube trays. (Separately, that is.) Once frozen solid, I pop the individual cubes into plastic bags, and then they’re easy to use, as one ice cube usually contains enough zest to flavour whatever it is I’m making. And, oh, that flavour, and that fragrance! There’s really nothing else like it, although you can fake it reasonably well with a mixture of unwaxed regular orange and lime zest. Not the same, but it’ll do in the months after I’ve run through my supply of bitter orange.

But before the zesting and juicing (and I am hoping to find another batch in the next day or two, before they vanish as suddenly as they appeared), I celebrated with one of my favourite cakes:

Bitter orange and polenta cake

As a born midwesterner, cornmeal, better known over here by its Italian name of polenta, is something I grew up on. Cornbread and corn muffins were one of the few things my mother ever baked, although hers came from a box mix, and I say that without contempt: on the few occasions I’ve found Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix over here, I’ve cheerfully paid whatever extortionate price they wanted for it, because that stuff doesn’t even need nostalgia to make it taste good. A staple where I grew up, made, as it is, in Chelsea, MI. But, given that I don’t have ready access to the tasty cheat’s version, I have learned to bake cornbread from scratch. If I add blueberries to it, my father-in-law loves it, and Phil’s not really crazy about it in general, but he does love this cake, possibly because of the heady scent and flavour of the oranges, but most likely because I serve it with good Devon cream.

Most recipes for this cake contain a fair amount of ground almonds, but as anything made with ground almonds is far too reminiscent of marzipan, and both Phil and I utterly detest that shit, I had to do some fiddling and adaptation of a few recipes to come up with my own.

Bitter orange and polenta cake

For the cake:

250 grams of sweet butter, i.e., unsalted

250 grams golden caster sugar (I do have a preference for unrefined sugars, not because I delude myself into thinking they’re in any way nutritionally superior, but because I think they taste better. You can use white caster, though, if you prefer.)

4 eggs

Zest of three Seville oranges (sub 2 large sweet oranges, and one lime, if no Seville oranges available.) Juice the oranges, and set aside 125ml for the glaze.

175 grams polenta. I used the regular stuff, not quick-cook, but I would be surprised if it made any difference; it’s just what I had in stock.

175 grams unbleached plain white flour

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp orange flower water. Rosewater is dandy, too, or vanilla extract, if you like; I just wanted an overwhelmingly fragrant orange cake! All three are optional.

1-2 tablespoons slivered pistachios

For the syrup:

125 ml Seville orange juice

125 grams golden caster sugar

Preheat the oven to 170ºC, and grease and line a round cake pan. Mine was 22cm.

Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, one by one, then add in the dry ingredients, plus the orange flower water, and the orange juice left, after you’ve saved 125ml for the glaze. (3 Sevilles really should give you enough for both the glaze, and a small amount for the cake, but if yours are small, or mean with their juices, juice another one.) Mix until your batter is incorporated, and then spoon into the cake pan, and smooth the top. This is a thick batter, as this is a fairly dense cake, and I mean that in the best possible way.

Begin testing for doneness at about 35-40 minutes. Mine took just over 50 minutes to be done, but everybody’s oven is different. You probably know the drill: when a tester/toothpick/skewer comes out of the centre clean, it’s done. Remove from oven, give it a couple of minutes, and then turn out onto a rack to cool.

Once the cake is cool, put the remaining orange juice and caster sugar into a small pan, and bring to the boil on the hob, then allow to simmer until reduced down to a nice syrupy consistency. Figure 5-10 minutes. Once done, allow to cool, and then pour over the cool cake, and sprinkle with pistachio slivers. Serve with single cream or Greek yogurt, as you please.

This cake keeps pretty well in the fridge; I’m on Day 4 of mine, with a couple of slices left, and it’s still doing fine, although that’s going to be one slice left, after I hit publish on this.

So we ended up having an unexpected guest last night; Phil texted his dad at midnight, to say happy new year, and invited him to drop in when he got back from his evening with Phil’s cousin’s family. He came in and had a drink and a chat with us, ’round the dining room table, then eventually pushed off and I went to bed. Phil obviously stayed up for a couple more hours, so come morning, I was up early, and he still slumbers on.

To keep myself occupied, and because we have his dad coming back tonight for our usual Friday dinner, I started mooching through the leftovers, looking for ways to give them new life. I had a bunch of filo scraps, many lemons, so many eggs, and as it happens, horrifying amounts of caster sugar, and a big pot of Fage Greek yogurt in the fridge, along with a vague memory from my baklava research, of something called patsavoura glyko, a sweet yogurt pie made with jumbled-up filo scraps. No delicate handling needed, just bunch ’em up in the bottom of a lightly greased pan, mix up the yogurt with oil, sugar, eggs, a bit of baking powder, and some vanilla extract (although I added some lemon zest, ‘cuz I think lemon zest improves practically any creamy sweet thing), which you then pour over the filo, and bake at about 200° C for 30-ish minutes or so. Then you let it cool, and pour over a hot lemon syrup, and voilà, you got your patsavoura glyko. Because I cannot leave well enough alone, or, seemingly, follow a recipe precisely, I cut the recipe roughly in half, as I’m only feeding three people, and there was the lemon zest, and there might possibly be some rosewater in the syrup, because I love rosewater.

It’s cooling now, and I am soon to take a break from writing to make the syrup. At the moment, however, I have some oxtails roasting in the oven, as a preliminary to making a good, hearty, beef stock. When I first moved over here, the BSE-era rules about beef on the bone were still strictly enforced, and this made it hard to make a really good stock. Happily, the ban ended some time back, but finding good soup bones can still be a challenge, and I was resigned to commercial beef stock (the liquid Touch of Taste concentrate is actually pretty good) until one day, in Sainsbury’s, I spotted some oxtails. Hello! I thought. Beef bones, and in a nice, compact form. I had absolutely no experience with oxtail, but figured they’d work, and so they did. You want an intensely flavoursome jellied beef stock, which freezes beautifully? Oxtail. Very strong, so it has to be cut with water, but it’s nice to have so much flavour for such a small commitment of freezer space, always at a premium around here.

So, to get rid of my stock of wilting herbs, some sad-looking celery, and a few flabby carrots (all still perfectly fine and safely edible, just nothing you’d want to bite into raw), I grabbed a package of oxtails when I saw them in the shop. I’ll pull them out of the oven, chuck them in one of my slow cookers (I, uh, have three of them, and I’d probably buy a mini if I could find one) with the veg and herbs, cover it all with water, and then ignore it for 12 hours or so, which is when the unpleasant part comes, and I have to strain it. Gack. Worth it, but I do dread that part.

There appears to be some kind of paleo/autoimmune cult around bone stock these days, and, well, I doubt it’s quite the miracle devotées of said cult believe, but it’s good stuff, and if people who invest it with magical properties create enough of a demand for it that I can find oxtails easily, without having to go to the inconveniently-located butcher, great! Unfortunately, this also drives prices up — see what happened to lamb shanks for an example — but every time I see a £3 whole chicken in the shops, I feel kind of sad and horrible, as I wonder what kind of conditions those chickens, and the people who raise and process them, must live and work in. Organic/free-range seem more realistically priced, but harder to find. Still, if your food budget is severely limited, there’s a couple of meals to be got from a chicken…and then I remind myself that I am being one of those middle-class people, the kind who is one patronising step away from telling economically disadvantaged people all of the time-consuming and skill-heavy ways they could be feeding themselves cheaper and more healthily, and I want to smack myself.

Right. So that bit up there was such a downer that I wandered off to make my rosewater/lemon syrup, which I duly soaked my cake with, and the cake tastes great, although it’s far from photogenic. You know what is photogenic? This:

I found Yorkshire pudding more intimidating than baklava. I don’t cook much plain English, and it would be just like me to fall on my ass with something so simple. Fortunately, it was great!

I made toad-in-the-hole for tea, as I think my father-in-law had kind of hit the wall with all the spicy stuff I’ve been cooking of late, and on a wretchedly cold and rainy night, stodge with onion gravy goes down a treat. I used some of my leftover onion confit as a base for the gravy, and got another couple of hundred grams of flour and 4 eggs out of my overstock — I made far too much batter, but it’ll keep well enough, so I’ll make something else of it tomorrow. Possibly some sort of clafoutis, depending on what kind of fruit I can scrounge up. I swear I am totally going off desserts as a regular thing, once Phil goes back to work, because god knows the extra kilo of holiday lard needs to be driven off as soon as possible, but in the meantime, the ugly Greek yogurt and filo cake tasted much better than it looked.

We never do much for New Year’s Eve. Once the shops have closed, and the bars and clubs have opened, we’re already tucked in cosily, with a bottle of champagne for me (OK, this year it’s an un-drunk bottle of Cava from Boxing Day), and a few beers for him, and nothing more debauched than maybe a little midnight feast of Welsh rarebit ahead of us. To my shame, I am listening to Absolute 80s radio while writing this and sipping my cava, which also to my shame is pink Cava, because why not?

Our somewhat naff town, on the other hand, is celebrating with its usual combination of heroic binge drinking and blowing shit up. It has its charms, does this place, but they’re really not best in evidence on New Year’s Eve.

Still, once I’d made the last run to the shops, after a day of wretched, cold, rainy weather, I was happy enough to drift into the kitchen to make a dinner suitable for seeing 2015 out. Everything near its sell-by date in the shops that won’t be open tomorrow was going dead cheap, and I came home triumphantly bearing some decent minced lamb and a couple of 10p avocados. A rustle through the pantry netted me a tin of chickpeas, and a tube of tomato purée, the spice rack offered up a jar of ras el hanout paste, there was a tube of harissa, rapidly ageing bunches of herbs, and a jar of preserved lemons in the fridge, onions and garlic in abundance, and my trusty tins of smoked paprika. A tasty quickie tagine was the result, along with a nice salad, featuring one of the avocados, some leftover olives, and patiently-ripened tomatoes, and the bit of dressing from the Greek salad I made on Boxing Day. But this:

Maple-Pecan Wholemeal Bread.

was the part I was really looking forward to eating. I baked a fresh loaf of the maple-pecan wholemeal bread I made for Boxing Day (the remainder of which has long since met its destiny as cheese on toast, and oh boy, do we have a lot of cheese left over…), a recipe I originally got from Nigella Lawson’s How to be a Domestic Goddess, and which I have been tinkering with ever since. Today’s innovation was to use 300mls of dry cider (once again. left over from Boxing Day, are you sensing a theme?) instead of water, and slightly more than the usual amount of maple syrup, and I always mess with my flour mixes. This bread is not noticeably sweet; Phil thinks it mostly tastes like an exceptionally good, multi-grain “hippie bread,” — his words, not mine, but somewhat apropos — and it is gorgeous with cheese. Toasts nicely, as well. I’m not sure the cider really added anything to it, but it didn’t do it any harm at all. I washed it with egg, beaten with about a teaspoon of (yes, left over…) double cream, which gave it a nice shiny crust. It’s a bit fresh for toasting, but what the hell; we want our Welsh rarebit.

…and so we had it, as Phil decided Snacking Hour had come. I made my rarebit with some Cornish Yarg that went mostly untouched on Boxing Day, as I suspect the grimy-looking nettle leaf rind put our guests off, which is a shame, as Yarg is a very good cheese. In retrospect, I think maybe it was a bit too gentle for the rarebit, but the good dash of dry English mustard and generous shake of Worcestershire sauce livened it up.

And, two glasses of Cava, and one snack down, I am wondering if I’m going to make it to midnight. 2015 was, in many respects, not a great year for me, but it had its moments, and when those moments came, they were some of the best. I’m not sorry to see it pass, and I’m going to try to approach 2016 with a bit of cautious hope that perhaps the great moments will outweigh the not-great ones when its turn to be the year slipping away near midnight comes.

I keep waking up in the night, worrying about how I’m going to get everything done, and what I have to cook or bake or buy today. Then I remind myself it’s OK, I have no more to do for Boxing Day, and now all I have to do is repurpose leftovers. And that’s going pretty well! Plenty went straight into the freezer, and can just be thawed and heated up at a later date, and I’ve made two batches of soup so far, some of which went to feed us, some went to my father-in-law, and the rest will be eaten, or remade into something else, and frozen. It’ll be OK! I’m basically done! But my nervous system hasn’t quite got the message yet.

Back to the food on the day, though. Unfortunately, due to the fact that I had a roomful of people wanting to eat, Phil didn’t get a chance to take photos of the albóndigas or the chorizo a la sidra, but meatballs and sausages aren’t terribly photogenic anyway, and trust me, they were delicious. The sausage I bought from Lunya was perfection, and many thanks to Lunya’s chef, who came out of the kitchen, carrying sausages from his own stock, when the shop assistant kindly went back to find out which of their (many, many) sorts of chorizo I should use, in response to my query, insisting I must use these sausages, these were the sort they used, and unsurprisingly he was right, as they were fantastic. (Basically, you need to go with an uncured sausage, and they had only cured in the deli’s chiller case.) I can’t say enough nice things about Lunya. I’ve been going in there for years, and have never found the staff anything less than helpful and friendly and totally knowledgable about their wares.

And there’s the muhumarra! This turned out to be my favourite thing, and it was totally last minute; I had some uneaten roasted red peppers, a lot of leftover walnuts, and a few bits of stale bread to use up, and thus, gorgeous, lovely, muhumarra.

All as seen previously, but perhaps a little more clearly here. The spanakopita disappeared in the first round of feasting, and the sausage rolls weren’t far behind. I kicked some butt with those, I did. (Plenty stashed in the freezer, but people were losing steam at that point, so I didn’t bake more.)

Muhummara, oh I am so pleased with that stuff. And so pleased I have the leftovers all to myself. Yum!mezze corner! olives, nibbly things, guacamole, hummus, muhammara, Greek salad (that was amazing; I’d been tenderly ripening those tomatoes for days, glimpses of spanakopita and mediterranean herbed steamed potatoes

And there it is, my culinary meisterwerk. No, not, strictly speaking, a purely tapas spread, as Spain was far from the only country represented, but we most definitely did not have the traditional British or American holiday spread. To me, the spirit of tapas and mezze and the groaning board in general is pretty universal; come, eat, be sociable, and happy. Yes, I totally overdid it, but what the hell: it was good.